Northwestern University’s Galter Health Sciences Library will host a group viewing of the Medical Library Association’s upcoming webinar “Scoping Reviews: Mapping Your Course to Success”. The screening will take place on Tuesday, August 15, from 1:00 to 2:30 PM CST. The webinar will be shown in the Administrative Conference Room, Level 2, of the Galter Health Sciences Library, which is located at 303 E. Chicago Avenue in Chicago.

There is no cost to participate, but registration is required. More information about the webinar is available here.

On behalf of the ILA Reaching Forward Forum, I personally invite the members of the Illinois Association of College & Research Libraries Forum to submit a proposal to present at the 2018 Reaching Forward Conference.

The Reaching Forward Conference is the nation’s largest single-day conference for library staff of all areas of service and levels of expertise from public, school and special libraries. We offer over 40 conference sessions covering a wide array of topics, from advocacy and management, to programming (adults, teens and youth), collection development, reference, technical services, serving special populations and so much more.

The planning committee would love to have your forum represented with a speaker panel or program. Our 29th Annual Conference will be held Friday, May 4, 2018 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois. Proposals can be submitted via the online form. Proposals can be saved and revised at any time prior to the submission deadline of Friday, September 8 at 11:59 PM CST.

Description: Faculty are under pressure to “publish or perish” and they may need support to enhance the visibility and dissemination of their research. This presentation will discuss library services to assist faculty, provide examples of good visibility and dissemination practices, and review traditional and alternative metrics for evaluating research outputs. Attendees will gain insight that will inform and reinvigorate their partnerships with faculty.

Speaker Bio: Karen Gutzman is the Impact and Evaluation Librarian at Galter Health Sciences Library at Northwestern University. Karen works within the library’s Metrics and Impact Core to support individuals and groups in their understanding, assessment, visualization, and reporting of impactful outcomes of research and clinical care efforts.

This webinar will be eligible for one hour of Medical Library Association (MLA) Continuing Education credit and will be archived for future viewing.

SCR CONNECTions is a monthly web conference presented by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine South Central Region on various topics of interest to health sciences librarians and others. The webinar highlights topics such as NLM databases, subject specific resources and technology topics.

Sessions will be eligible for one hour of Medical Library Association (MLA) Continuing Education credit and will be archived for future viewing.

Choice launched The Authority File, a new sponsored podcast featuring conversations about academic libraries and librarianship, on Monday, July 31. The Authority File will feature weekly episodes in formats to include author/editor conversations about new books and products, thought-leadership interviews and discussions, and technology and product case studies. Hosted by Choice Editorial Director Bill Mickey, The Authority File is part of the suite of new content marketing options Choice offers to sponsors and advertisers through Choice Custom Studios.

The first four Authority File episodes center on an hour-long conversation with Raymond Pun and Meggan Houlihan, editors of “The First-Year Experience Cookbook” (ACRL 2017). The discussion ranges widely, covering each of the speaker’s careers and the general state of first-year experience librarianship. The Authority File is now available in the librarianship section of Choice’s website and directly via iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. It will also be accessible through the free ACRL-Choice app, available at the App store and Google Play.

ALA Connect http://connect.ala.org/, the online space where ALA groups collaborate, is being upgraded to a new and more flexible system that will be powered by Higher Logic. The launch is scheduled for Aug. 31.

ALA Connect gives communities of interest within the library profession the opportunity to connect, learn, express and engage on a variety of topics.

With the upgrade, ALA Connect will enhance the user experience with such features as a branded space where Divisions and Round Tables can communicate, search and collaborate.

Other new features will include a more stable platform, a more uniform system that will be easier to maintain and the ability to add features in the future such as badging and ribbons.

As part of the upgrade, to maintain the integrity of the information within our current system and transfer it to the new system, a “Gray-Out” period will occur, beginning Aug. 10 and ending on Aug. 31. During this time, users will not be able to make any edits or new posts to the system, although they will be able to view public content.

Beginning next week, ITTS will be providing information and updates on the upgrade. Materials will include weekly updates and reminders, links to short videos showcasing the new features and emails with tips and links to instructional videos.

If you have any questions, please feel free to view our videos or contact Pam Akins at pakins@ala.org.

In this webinar for expert and aspiring expert searchers, you will learn what a scoping review is, how to work with research teams on the scoping review process, and when to recommend a scoping review. This informative, lively, discussion-based webinar focuses on practical solutions to data management and search challenges of scoping reviews, enabling you to improve the quality of your search services and raise your profile in your environment. Participants will be invited to submit scoping review questions prior to the webinar.

Who should attend: All health information professionals with some searching experience who want to learn about scoping reviews as alternatives to systematic reviews.

Whitney A. Townsend is an informationist in the Taubman Health Sciences
Library at the University of Michigan. She has been a member of numerous
systematic and scoping review teams, instructs on systematic review
searching and methodology for residents, fellows, and faculty, and is an
instructor for the systematic review workshop funded by the NNLM Greater
Midwest Region, “Systematic Reviews: Opportunities for Librarians.” She was
a panelist on the MLA Webcast “Beyond Systematic: The Librarian’s Role in
Shaping Reviews,” and she spends a lot of time directing researchers to
different review methodologies better suited to their questions, including
scoping reviews.

Kate M. Saylor works at the University of Michigan Taubman Health Sciences
Library. She is the informationist for the School of Nursing, School of
Public Health’s Health Behavior and Health Education department, and the
Office of Public Health Practice. Kate has advised on numerous systematic
and scoping review projects, is an instructor for the “Systematic Reviews:
Opportunities for Librarians” workshop, and teaches systematic review
methodology and advanced searching for the research synthesis courses in
the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) and PhD programs at the School of
Nursing.

As precision medicine grows in popularity, so too does the demand on health
information professionals to communicate complex information about genetics
to lay audiences. This webinar introduces health information professionals
to recent research on learning styles, health and genetic literacy, and
precision medicine communication, so that they can effectively assist
patients and health care consumers in understanding precision medicine
treatments. The websites and tools introduced during the webinar will be
immediately very useful to all attendees.

Taneya Koonce, Helen Naylor, Sheila Kusnoor, and Nunzia Giuse, FMLA are
affiliated with the Center for Knowledge Management, Vanderbilt University
Medical Center as researchers, administrators, or faculty. Collectively,
they bring knowledge and years of experience in genetics, consumer
health/patient informatics, patient communication, biochemistry, and using
health literacy and learning style preferences to create patient health
communication models for complex health and genetic information.

Who should attend: All health information professionals; no previous
knowledge or experience required.

The Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) announces that its Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ) journal will move to open access beginning with the Fall, 2017, issue. RUSQ disseminates information of interest to reference librarians, information specialists and other professionals involved in user-oriented library services. The decision to move RUSQ from subscription based to open access was based on many factors, most notably the open access movement strongly supported by librarians. Other factors include ensuring a continued pool of strong authors and articles, ease of access for readers as well as broader worldwide access as the cost for professional journal subscriptions is extremely prohibitive.

RUSA represents librarians and library staff in the fields of reference, specialized reference, collection development, readers’ advisory and resource sharing. RUSA is the foremost organization of reference and information professionals who make the connections between people and the information sources, services and collection materials they need.

The program proposal submission deadline for the 2018 ALA Annual Conference, to take place at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, LA, June 21-26, 2018, has been extended to 12:00 AM CST (midnight) on Tuesday, September 5, 2017.Programs at the Annual Conference are one-hour educational sessions on a topic relevant to the library profession, and submissions are open to anyone, regardless of ALA membership status. For the first time, proposals will be accepted through one submission site for all ALA Divisions, RoundTables, Committees, and Offices.

Your ALA account information will be required to access the submssion site. Final decisions will be made on Wednesday, October 11, and the schedule of sessions will be announced on Wednesday, November 8. Inquiries and additional details regarding the submission form, subjects and content types can be found by visiting the submission site. Take a look back at the 2017 Annual Conference here.

It’s not email déjà vu – STS puts on two great research-based events each year! In case you weren’t able to attend (or even if you did!), here are the links and abstracts from the 2017 STS Research Forum:

Featured Paper:

The Cost of Doing Biology: A Citation Analysis of Freely Available Scholarly Articles

The changing nature of scholarly publishing has fundamentally altered the relationship between patron, library, and information. One key change in that relationship is the perception of what scholarly resources, namely journal articles, are available without cost from sources outside of the library. This project asks, how much of what biologists cite is available without cost online? Faculty publications from the Department of Biology were collected for the calendar years 2011 to 2016 and their citations extracted from Scopus. Free full-text availability of cited articles was checked using PubMed and PubMed Central, Google and Google Scholar, ResearchGate and Academia.edu, and Sci-Hub. A coding scheme assigned a color representing availability in descending order as: being in PubMed Central, in an Open Access Journal, on ResearchGate or Academia.edu, on an “other” web resource, or in Sci-Hub. Sources were also coded as being available only through the library, as a book in the library, or as neither free online or available in the library.

Initial results based on 9,961 citations from 17 faculty (30% of the department) show that 82% of cited articles are available freely without the use of Sci-Hub. The percentage grows to 98% when Sci-Hub is included. These numbers point to an information ecosystem that runs parallel to traditional library collections. They also hint at a possible paradigmatic shift in how collections are built, managed, and access mediated. Future research based on the data will begin to elucidate user behavior in relation to non-library scholarly resource usage.

Authors looking for a journal to publish a paper are often confronted with a plethora of journals in their field. Some are published by reputable publishers, but since 2008 many less-than reputable open access journals promising fast peer review have appeared. New researchers are usually familiar with the literature in their field, but may want to establish a scholarly record by publishing in more specialized journals before aiming for the major title in their discipline. They may consult their library’s catalog, journal list or directory, or a librarian for help identifying a potential journal for an article.

Several journal matching systems have been developed to help authors match proposed titles and abstracts to a journal that publishes on a given topic. They include Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE), Journal Guide, Scientific Journal Finder, Edanz and ResearchGate. Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis and EndNote Online have similar systems. No head-to-head tests have been performed to determine whether and how well they match a published article to the journal where it appeared.

Titles and abstracts of 394 published articles in Agriculture, Biology, Chemistry, Geography, Geology and Physics were identified and submitted to the various journal matching systems. The ability of the systems to match articles to a reputable journal (First Match, Top 5 Matches, or Match Anywhere) was noted. The final results of the head-to-head test of the various journal matching systems will be presented. Of the three systems tested thus far only about 25-30% of the articles matched their respective journals.

Linda Zellmer, Western Illinois University

Science Database Holdings at ARL and Oberlin Group Academic Libraries from 2010 to 2016: a Longitudinal Study

This paper presents results of an open-ended project to record science and technology (scitech) oriented database holdings at ARL University and Oberlin Group libraries. The study originated from the hypothesis that the combination of drop-offs in higher education funding, pressure on collections budgets, and improvements in Google Scholar and Scopus coverage might lead libraries to consider canceling specialized scitech databases and/or rely on comprehensive databases such as Scopus or Web of Science. The author annually documents the holdings of 74 Oberlin Group Libraries for 24 databases, and 108 ARL Libraries for 22 databases based on library website A-Z database lists. Libraries that do not allow off-campus access to database lists or only provide subject based lists are excluded. All cancellations or additions are verified through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine or personal email. Initial results of the research were presented in poster form at ALA Chicago 2013. This paper session provides an opportunity to get feedback on the project as the author prepares the research for journal publication. A few of the trends found include: Most frequently cancelled databases are the former Wilson science indexes, and INSPEC. Compendex is beginning to see a drop-off. Most frequently added database is Scopus, which went from 25 in 2010 to a current 60 Libraries in ARL. Only two ARL/Oberlin libraries with Scopus have cancelled Web of Science.

This unique ongoing research provides an important perspective on trends in selected scitech database holdings that was previously unavailable.

Timothy Klassen, University of Alberta

Again, if you were inspired by these research projects, submit your own proposal for next year! The call will come out in December.